The State of Climate Sophistry

Written by Joseph A Postma on August 3, 2025. Posted in Current News

Let us review the state of climate pseudoscience and how Climate of Sophistry defeated it. I highly recommend that everyone study this essay as you will inevitably encounter these arguments when dealing with the climate change question online.

Where does the theory of climate begin? It begins with these figures and the mathematical results of them:

I was taught with an identical approach in 2^nd year astrophysics planetary sciences, and Roy Spencer, PhD in Climatology, can be quoted as stating that there is no climate scientist who disagrees with nor does not utilize these diagrams in understanding the climate. Thus, the first thing that these diagrams establish is a boundary condition, a cognitive phase-space, or a paradigm, from which comprehension and subsequent extrapolation is made about the way that the climate must work. I first wrote about this here in Copernicus Meets the Greenhouse Effect.

The valid physics in these diagrams is that energy input must equal energy output for the sake of conservation of energy, that is, the energy input from the Sun must equal the energy output from the Earth, assuming negligible secondary contributions. When you perform that calculation you get the radiative effective temperature of the Earth, which is the temperature at which a perfect emitter would have to be in order to emit the same amount of energy. We use “effective temperature” in astrophysics as a basic metric for categorizing stars, although, as with the Earth, there is typically a wide divergence between the star’s actual spectrum vs. that of a perfect emitter’s spectrum which would be a Planck curve of blackbody emission. But to perform this computation for effective temperature one must use the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, F = σ T_eff⁴. The Stefan-Boltzmann equation uses an “F” because its units are flux which is Joules per second per square meter, which is the total energy calculated earlier but then divided by the surface area which that energy either originates from or falls upon. The units of flux simplify to Watts per square meter (W/m²) since a Joule per second is a Watt.

Thus, what is invalid is using the flux to equate energy input and output rather than energy, because flux is not energy; energy is conserved via energy, which is just Joules, not Joules per square meter per second. The units are different, obviously. Flux is space & time dependent, as it has units of energy in Joules, but per square meter and per second. You can only make flux and energy equivalent for energy conservation if the input and output surface area is identical, and this obviously does not occur for the Earth given that the input of energy from sunlight is only over the day-side, or half of the Earth, whereas the entire surface area of the Earth can be assumed to be emitting energy back out into space.

Is this important? Of course it is. In physics we want to understand how matter reacts to energy, and the response of matter to energy is entirely dependent on the intensity of that energy when it interacts with matter, and energy’s intensity is given by its flux. The example of a 9 Watt laser is pertinent: 9 Watts is barely any energy at all, only 9 Joules per second, however, coming in the form of a laser beam only 0.1 millimeters in radius this energy has a flux in the hundreds of millions of Watts per square meter, and this makes the laser beam intense enough to burn through a thin piece of metal, or a thick piece of wood, etc. Nine Watts isn’t even a rating for traditional lightbulbs it would be so weak and feeble, but when concentrated to a dot o.1 millimeters in radius, it becomes another thing entirely. Intensity – it’s a thing!

And so back to those introductory climate diagrams: What do they show? They show that the flux input from the Sun is equal to the flux output from the Earth. Given that input flux and output flux can only be numerically identical if the surface which receives the flux is equal in area to the surface which emits the flux, the Earth is then drawn as a flat line since this is the only geometric way that that equality could hold – if the Earth were a flat plane facing the Sun. In other words we’re literally doing mathematical flat Earth theory here. If one were to start with a flat Earth assumption from the beginning, one would necessarily draw the Earth as a flat plane and then work out the math for how that would have to work, and the math would be the same as is shown in the climate energy budget diagrams. What is the distinction if our mathematical model has to look like a flat plane for the Earth, vs. we actually intended to do flat Earth theory and get the same math and figures? It is difficult to split hairs here.

By spreading sunshine as an input over the entire surface of the Earth at all times, since flux is being used to do that in those diagrams and flux is fundamentally connected to the space and time it exists within, and since this takes the sunlight flux which empirically falls only over a hemisphere but stretches it over the entire surface, the intensity of the sunlight flux input is thereby reduced to a value which it does not actually exist as. The mathematical result is a solar heating of only -18⁰C, which then says that the Sun is too feeble to create the climate. This is the primary, basic, foundational pedagogical boundary cognition, or paradigm, that our entire scientific and educational apparatus at every level, exists within: the Sun is unable to explain the climate and the temperatures which we experience. This foundation is the functional result of treating the Earth as a flat plane which experiences a constant feeble Sun heat of only -18⁰C.

In the figure above we see one example of the common flat-Earth theory approach to understanding how energy from the Sun must fall upon the Earth. The figure above and others like it depict the entire Earth as a flat plane, and they divide the solar flux by a factor of four in order to spread the spherical cross-section of intercept by the Earth of the solar radiation over the entire surface area of the Earth which is a sphere with four-times the surface area, but now represented as a flat plane. These figures are definitely representing the entire surface area of the Earth as a flat plane because of that factor of four being present.

We encounter our first example of sophistry with this fact being presented to the academic and scientific establishment which has adopted this flat Earth theorizing into their pedagogy. You see, something is being pointed out which is rather embarrassing, given that the scientific establishment certainly does not accept nor believe in flat Earth theory, yet nevertheless utilizes the mathematics and diagrams of flat Earth theory for the purposes of climate science. It must trigger a discomforting cognitive dissonance with the natural result that instead of acknowledging it, and risking personal embarrassment at not having realized it for oneself, the face-saving solution is to defend the flat Earth methodology being employed, and the simplest approach to do that is to deny that it is a flat Earth.

The most recent argument, which seems to originate from Roy Spencer, is that since the factor of four comes from a sphere’s surface area, the flat Earth diagram is therefore representative of the Earth being a sphere, not a flat plane. Roy states that the factor of four is the result of “time averaging” the input flux over twenty-four hours, and that the diagram uses a flat line for the Earth is nothing to do with saying that the Earth is a flat plane. Well, although no one is saying that the Earth is a flat plane, nevertheless it is drawn as such just as flat Earth theory would do it, and the math of a uniform input with solar flux divided by four as an input is such that it is also entirely how flat Earth theory would have to work it out. But we can refer back to the 9 Watt laser to understand how this “time averaging” to turn the Earth sphere into a flat plane is not actually a physically meaningful or valid thing to do.

Consider a sphere of wood with a surface area of one square meter. This sphere can rotate underneath the laser beam in such a way as to evenly cast the laser beam over the entire surface over twenty four hours. If we time average the 9 Watt laser over a sphere with a surface area of one square meter, then the flux of the laser upon the sphere is 9 W/m². In fact, it doesn’t matter how much time has elapsed, as the sphere could rotate in 12 hours, 5 minutes, or one year, depending on the rate of rotation of the sphere, and still the result would always come out to 9 W/m² for one revolution of the sphere. Time averaging therefore has no effect on the flux since it always works out to the same value. Since the result is a uniform flux over the entire sphere, we could simply draw it as a flat line and depict an input of 9 W/m² falling over the flat surface, on average. An average flux of this value is almost negligible, a simple faint glow, and would have no effect on the sphere. Would this flat wooden sphere approximation be meaningful?

The reality of the situation is that the 9 W laser had a real-time flux in the hundreds of millions of Watts per square meter due to its beam having a tiny surface area in cross section, and this real-time flux was driving such an action that the beam would have been burning holes right through the wooden sphere. Thus, “time averaging” the energy of the laser over the entire sphere as a flat plane does not result in a value which can explain what the sphere actually experienced. The sphere would have had holes burned into it and its surface would have been thermally evaporating in the heat due to ~100,000,000 W/m² laser flux, and so the flat Earth method excused as “time averaging” with a result of a feeble 9 W/m² which is too weak to do anything but cast a dim glow does not characterize the laser beam and its reality in interacting with the sphere.

If all that we’re trying to do is to have a model where input energy equals output energy, this is such a simple concept that no figure needs to be drawn for it. We expect input to equal output given the Law of Conservation of Energy; it is not an alarming or extravagant concept. However, if Roy Spencer and others wish to claim with wrangled sophistry that the flat Earth diagram is actually a sphere, then, why not simply allay this concern and draw this “time averaged” value of flux on an actual sphere?

Read the rest at climateofsophistry.com

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